We evaluated GitHub Copilot for three months GitHub announced its launch of GitHub Copilot for Business in February of this year. This announcement immediately caught our attention and interest, and engineers across the organization shared their desire to use this product. After aligning internally on an adoption strategy, we decided to evaluate GitHub Copilot for three months to learn how it can help us be more productive. This blog post describes our path to evaluating and adopting GitHub Copilot. How we evaluated the impact of GitHub Copilot for 3 months was originally published i ..read more

How I set up a system to capture, organize, prioritize and execute all the work I am doing and to ensure I don’t forget anything I need to do and to keep as few things as possible in my head In our industry, deep focus work is of major importance. For me, with limited brain capacity available, I realized early on that having as few things in my head as possible allows the most focus on the current task at hand. This is how my love for typed, functional, immutable programming, with languages like Scala or Haskell, developed (less things to reason about at any point, looking at you immutab ..read more

Our product and development teams here at commercetools have doubled in size over the last year, and we plan to continue to grow. This growth means that new product domains and a multi-level org structure have become a natural necessity for us. However, staying lean and agile is as important. That is why we need to have a comprehensive and varied structure of roles, not only to address these needs, but also to support different career tracks someone may want to take in product management at commercetools. Product managers across all levels have to demonstrate a skill set grounded on 3 wide pil ..read more

I have been working at commercetools as a Software Engineer for more than five years now. Even before the pandemic, commercetools has always been a remote and home office friendly employer. We always supported people working from home. What has changed oover the last two and a half years is that we have gotten better at effectively and mindfully creating a remote-friendly work environment together. Taking it up a notch, about three years ago, I started to work fully remote from Vienna, Austria, in a country and city where commercetools does not have an office as one of the first fully remote e ..read more

Product & Tech — Better Together! Soft drink and burger — better together! Nature Vectors by Vecteezy The one big challenge in product development is that there are always so many ideas and so little time! Or so they say. The far bigger challenge is that we’re all humans, with our own ambitions, biases, strengths, egos, and flaws — all the things that make us our amazing and wonderful selves. At commercetools, we believe that no matter how well established your processes and methodologies are, you can only be successful if you set up your organization for people, and not for cogs in a ..read more

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash Over the last several years the commercetools team and product witnessed an exponential growth that required organisational changes as well as a strong technical foundation to accompany the current and future growth plans. The Merchant Center, which is our main web application for administrating the project data in our Composable Commerce APIs, was no exception to that growth. When we started developing the Merchant Center application we were a small team of frontend developers and designers. We had our own repository, our own process, our o ..read more

At the beginning of 2020, I organized an offsite for 15 Scala Engineers. A few weeks later, our CEO asked everyone to temporarily work from home. Many teams were already distributed across two offices in Germany as well as the US and Vietnam even before Covid-19. This temporariness became permanency, and we embraced it by starting to hire remotely. Which leads me to our topic today. In a remote-first world, how can we create a work environment that fosters deep connection? I’m the guy with the microphone in front :) Many remote-first companies regularly organize offsites or “retreats” — a ..read more

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash We are an established scale-up with a well-known product and a substantial customer base. We are still experiencing a heightened state of growth, meaning new product domains, org structures, and roles are being built as we speak. Evolving our Tech Leadership track and adding new Staff and Principal Engineer roles felt like a natural step, marking down an important milestone in our organizational growth. When we designed our tech leadership track, we looked at our internal requirements and, at the same time, at what others in the industry are doing. Both s ..read more

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash More than an answer, we have a story. More than a story, we have an evolution log of how we built our own Tech Leadership track, from the early stages of a ‘Tech Lead’ to the latest iteration within our organization structure: introducing Staff and Principal Engineer roles. Our product is an API-first, cloud-native SaaS with API performance, uptime, data security and developer experience at the core of our value proposition. Whenever we’re describing what it takes to build our product, two essential characteristics come up: technical excellence and t ..read more

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies continue to gain mainstream traction as a digital currency. This post outlines three methods of integrating cryptocurrency with your commercetools project. In the past 3 months (Q4 2021), one Bitcoin was valued at an average of 47,548.40 US dollars. These digital coins have value in many online marketplaces. Popular websites and mobile applications such as Overstock.com, NewEgg, Twitch, Twitter, and Wikipedia.com currently accept Bitcoin. The technical aspects of implementing bitcoin into your very own online store and commercetools project are outlined  ..read more